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The US-based website that publishes a daily unofficial exchange rate between American dollars and Venezuelan bolivares has recently filed a vigorous defense in a strange international lawsuit. The site, DolarToday, was sued in October 2015 by the Central Bank of Venezuela (CBV) in federal court in Delaware, where the site is based.

In its bizarre and bombastic civil complaint, the US-based lawyer for the CBV argued that the three Venezuelan-American men who run the site are engaged in "cyber-terrorism" designed to create "the false impression that the Central Bank and the Republic are incapable of managing Venezuela’s economy."

The CBV formally accuses DolarToday of violating a major anti-racketeering and criminal conspiracy statute (RICO Act), false advertising, unjust enrichment, and strangely, breaching a Venezuelan civil statute that refers to "causing harm." (Obviously, an American federal court is unlikely to adjudicate claims made under Venezuelan law.)

To put it mildly, the Venezuelan economy has been in something of a tailspin in recent years. Its authoritarian president, Nicolas Maduro, the successor of strongman Hugo Chavez, has been unable to rein in skyrocketing inflation (now near 100 percent) and a massively depressed economy. Recent press reports have detailed that many people are unable to buy basic goods like diapers and cooking oil. This week, the Financial Times described the country as being on the "edge of a political crisis."

Venezuela has maintained currency controls since 2003 and its currency cannot—at least officially—be traded on the open market. The government maintains multiple "official" exchange rates, which differ depending on what purpose the foreign currency is needed for. The black market exchange rate, at least according to DolarToday, is significantly higher: as of this writing $1 buys about 865 bolivares.

Phone home

DolarToday, as it explains in its filing, does nothing more than call currency traders on the Venezuelan-Colombian border to find out what the exchange rate is between bolivares and pesos. The site simply converts the pesos to dollars to find out the market rate between bolivares and dollars, and then publishes that figure.

This simple operation, as it turns out, infuriates the Venezuelan government.

Since 2013, [DolarToday, or DT] and its suspected owners and operators have been targeted for censorship and harassment by the Revolutionary Government in Venezuela, including, but not limited to, by the following acts admitted in the Complaint and its incorporated materials: (1) intermittently and permanently "blocking" the DT Site on the Internet; (2) hacking the DT Site and/or "mirror" websites; (3) in December 2014, broadcasting a nationally-televised speech in which Venezuelan President, Nicolás Maduro, denounced the owners of DT as "bandits" who are waging an "economic war against Venezuela from Miami" and vowed to put them "behind bars;" and (4) in April 2015, broadcasting another nationally-televised speech in which Maduro stated he would ask the President of the United States to hunt down the operators of the DT Site and extradite them to Venezuela to be tried as criminals.

In the same filing, Stuhlman argues that the Venezuelan government has essentially no case.

He continues:

Facing a national economic crisis largely of its own creation, the Revolutionary Government has censored the press and online media from publishing "negative" information about the Venezuelan economy, under the pretext that it is protecting the Venezuelan people from the damaging effects that negativity has on the nation’s economy. To be sure, the only thing the Revolutionary Government is protecting is its own slippery grip on power. The Complaint is just another "weapon" in the Revolutionary Government’s arsenal of censorship against DT, whose only "crime" has been to facilitate access to information to the general public. But, the Revolutionary Government clearly failed to calibrate its "weapon" before it fired it. Premised on implausible legal theories, the Complaint fails to satisfy even the basic jurisdictional and pleading requirements. For all of the reasons described above, the Court should enter an Order dismissing the Complaint with prejudice, and awarding Defendants such other relief as the Court deems just and proper.

The judge will likely rule on the motion within the coming months.

Promoted Comments

I live in Venezuela. The inept Chávez/Maduro gov't has been trying to curb the black-market exchange rate (which supplies an increasingly larger part of the also-growing demand for imported products) by increasingly ridiculous means, while shifting the blame for the runaway inflation onto anyone they can, while keeping *three* artificially low rates for their own purposes.

So we have 6.30 and 12.80 VEB/USD rates reserved for imports of necessity goods by the gov't and their cronies; a 200 VEB/USD rate that's supposedly available to private businesses and the general population but how they're assigned is a mystery; and the black-market rate which is illegal to even discuss (yes, shoot the messenger).

The “revolution” accuses websites posting their estimates of the black-market rate of driving prices up as part of a imaginary “economic war” waged against the country by large companies under U.S. tutelage; they mandated every local ISP to block DolarToday.com in their DNS servers but they also use Instagram and Facebook and share the CDN URLs instead.

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Cyrus Farivar
Cyrus is a Senior Tech Policy Reporter at Ars Technica, and is also a radio producer and author. His latest book, Habeas Data, about the legal cases over the last 50 years that have had an outsized impact on surveillance and privacy law in America, is out now from Melville House. He is based in Oakland, California. Emailcyrus.farivar@arstechnica.com//Twitter@cfarivar